"I don't battle anymore! I uplift motherfuckers!" - GZA
Wednesday, March 25, 2009,11:33 PM
Jay-Z's Secrets To Personal Success
With nearly 40 million albums sold and a business empire that includes clothing, fragrances, the New Jersey Nets, sports bars, liquor, and hotels, Jay-Z has transformed himself into one of the most potent brands in the world
By: Anthony DeCurtis
"With education comes refinement," Jay-Z observes late one Friday afternoon. He's lounging on a couch in a studio at the Chelsea Piers Sports and Entertainment complex on the far west side of Manhattan and speaking between nibbles of a takeout salad in a plastic container and sips from a bottle of water. In his everyday speech, as in his raps, Jay-Z is inclined toward aphorisms, the compressed expression of complicated ideas, delivered with rhetorical flair. It's hard-earned wisdom, graced by a poet's touch.
He is relaxing after a typically jam-packed day that included a photo shoot, an interview, and a meeting about his potential involvement in a forthcoming video game. He celebrated his 39th birthday the night before with the staff of his Rocawear clothing line, so a mild fatigue has set in. Slender and six feet three inches tall, Jay-Z is an imposing figure, even in relative repose. He's wearing distressed jeans that hang loosely from the middle of his hips, black sneakers, and a long-sleeved black T-shirt that has replaced the pristine short-sleeved white one he wore before changing for his photo shoot. The look is studiously casual...until you glance at his left wrist and notice a diamond watch so thick it could pass for a weight band.
The winter sky is growing gray in the bank of windows behind him as the sun sets over the Hudson River. Jay-Z returns to the narrative of what, in the 19th century, would have been called his sentimental education, the education of his emotional life. That journey to refinement began in the rugged Marcy Projects in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant district, and now continues in arenas and boardrooms, in posh homes and VIP hideaways, around the world.
Jay-Z feels comfortable in all of these realms. "I've never looked at myself and said that I need to be a certain way to be around a certain sort of people," he explains. "I've always wanted to stay true to myself, and I've managed to do that. People have to accept that. I collect art, and I drink wine...things that I like that I had never been exposed to. But I never said, 'I'm going to buy art to impress this crowd.' That's just ridiculous to me. I don't live my life like that, because how could you be happy with yourself?"
Staying true to yourself might stand as a succinct summary of Jay-Z's philosophy of success. The notion goes back to Shakespeare's "To thine own self be true," and further back than that to the Greeks. But for Jay-Z, it has an urgently contemporary meaning. Even, or perhaps, especially, in recessionary times, amid the thousands of entertainment and lifestyle choices consumers have available to them, what separates winners from losers is a commitment to a single proposition: You are the product. If people believe in you, they will believe in what you create. Jay-Z understands this and is down with it.
By selling nearly 40 million albums and building a business empire that extends far beyond music into clothing, fragrances, the New Jersey Nets, sports bars, liquor, and hotels (to name just a few of his seemingly innumerable investments), Jay-Z has transformed himself into one of the most potent brands in the world. But that brand retains its power only if people remain convinced that the product they are purchasing somehow genuinely reflects Jay-Z and his tastes. As he famously put it in one of his raps, "I'm not a businessman/I'm a business, man."
"My brands are an extension of me," he says. "They're close to me. It's not like running GM, where there's no emotional attachment." The reference is apt, given the government's ongoing potential bailout of two major automobile companies. Jay-Z notes that resonance with a pause and a chuckle.
"My thing is related to who I am as a person," he says. "The clothes are an extension of me. The music is an extension of me. All my businesses are part of the culture, so I have to stay true to whatever I'm feeling at the time, whatever direction I'm heading in. And hopefully, everyone follows."
In conversation, Jay-Z's speech is slower, calmer, and more deliberate than in the propulsive, deep-voiced, and often incendiary raps that have made him a titan in the world of hip-hop, a man whose sales and staying power have elevated him above all but a handful of potential rivals. He's an engaged and animated speaker, quick to touch you in a friendly way to emphasize a point.
But as laid-back and accessible as he seems, he also exudes a calm air of confidence. He doesn't need to be aggressive or impose his will in a ham-fisted manner. Half a dozen people are floating around the studio, ready to read any sign of need or impatience on his part. He's cooperative and congenial in the way that only someone who knows he can immediately put an end to any experience that moves in an unpleasant direction can be. "Jay-Hova," he has called himself, echoing the name of the mighty, vengeful God of the Hebrew Bible. He has anointed himself the "God MC."
But he has also rapped that he "never prayed to God/I prayed to Gotti." Perhaps there is a distinction to be drawn between Jay-Z, the battle MC who to this day engages in raw exchanges with younger rappers looking to take him down, and Shawn Corey Carter, the far-sighted businessman who cofounded his own label, Roc-A-Fella Records, in 1996; who served as president and CEO of Def Jam Records from 2005 to early 2008 and helped launch the careers of Kanye West, Young Jeezy, and Rihanna; who sold his Rocawear clothing line in 2007 for $204 million, while retaining a major stake in the company; and who, following a path blazed by Madonna and U2, forged a $150 million deal last year with the concert-promotion firm Live Nation.
Last summer, Forbes ranked Jay-Z seventh on its "Celebrity 100" list of the ultrafamous and ultrapowerful. The magazine estimated his annual income at $82 million, and other sources have reported his net worth at $350 million. If that doesn't seem enviable enough, last year Jay-Z married Beyonce Knowles, one of the world's most desirable women. It is part of his attitude of ultimate cool that he never publicly talks about her.
Jay-Z moves in exclusive circles of all types. Musicians, actors, designers, politicians, captains of industry, and athletes all want to get next to him. He has developed an easygoing manner that enables him to cross these cultural boundaries in ways that make him seem accessible but still dignified, always aware of who he is. "I'm a mirror," he says. "If you're cool with me, I'm cool with you, and the exchange starts. What you see is what you reflect. If you don't like what you see, then you've done something. If I'm standoffish, that's because you are."
Occasionally, stereotypes rear their heads and uncomfortable situations arise. "It's hilarious a lot of times," he says. "You have a conversation with someone, and he's like, 'You speak so well!' I'm like, 'What do you mean? Do you understand that's an insult?' "
Growing up, however, Shawn Carter was far from the likeliest candidate for this sort of mind-boggling success. He was always recognized as bright--even today, the first word anyone who meets Jay-Z invariably uses to describe him is smart--and in the sixth grade, he tested at 12th-grade levels. But the Marcy Projects in Brooklyn were overrun by drugs and violence in the '80s. His father left the family when Carter was 11, and his mother had to raise him, his older brother, and his two older sisters. When he was 12, Carter shot his brother for stealing his jewelry. (They have since reconciled.) Carter attended high school with fellow Brooklynites the Notorious B.I.G. and Busta Rhymes, but dropped out to deal drugs in a region that extended from Brooklyn to Maryland and Virginia--as he details in his music--and to dabble in the still-nascent hip-hop game.
Along with the dealers who ran the neighborhood around the Marcy Projects, Jay-Z remembers identifying sports figures as his first models of success. "Growing up where I grew up, we looked to athletes," he recalls. "They were our first heroes. They came from the same places we came from. I mean, you can't watch TV and see someone who is successful that you can really relate to. That person isn't real, he doesn't exist. But athletes traveled the world, had these big houses, and gave their families a better life. We were like, 'Wow, that's really cool.' These guys get paid millions of dollars to play the game they love."
Around the same time that he began to identify with athletes, Carter experienced another revelation: hip-hop. He began writing nonstop in notebooks, keeping his mother and siblings awake at night as he pounded the kitchen table to create beats. He hooked up with local rapper Jaz-O, who brought him to England when he toured there. Carter recorded with Jaz-O and also with Big Daddy Kane. But despite the acknowledgment of his skills (and his growing anxiety that either violence or the law would eventually catch up with him on the streets), Carter was reluctant to give up dealing. He was rolling in a Lexus and making more money, as far as he could tell, than most rappers.
Still, he decided to take the plunge, but no record company was willing to offer him a contract. So with two partners, Carter formed Roc-A-Fella Records, and, in 1996, released his debut album, Reasonable Doubt, which established him as a major figure on the hip-hop scene. It was a heady moment, but Jay-Z barely realized it at the time. "I was naive," he recalls. "I made that album to impress my friends, so they would say, 'Oh, wow, look what you did!' It was my first album on the label that we owned. I was like, 'Okay, what happens now?' "
What happened was that Jay-Z left drug dealing behind and began to build his empire, moving steadily from "grams to Grammys" as he puts it in one song. But the process wasn't easy. The treachery of life on the streets, where he faced bullets at close range, turned out to be nothing compared with what he would encounter in the upper echelons of the music business. "I come from a world that's completely different from the music industry, and it wasn't recognizable to me at all," he says. "I come from a place where you had to keep your word, where people would stick with you no matter what. That's impossible in the music business, where if you're not hot, people are not talking to you. I just tried to be a man of my word."
The choice of Roc-A-Fella as his label's name would prove telling. On one hand, it's standard hip-hop braggadocio to establish a connection between a fledgling rapper and one of the richest and most powerful families in American history. But it also suggested the means through which Jay-Z would eventually establish his own business empire. The Rockefeller family and other 19th-century industrialists established a monopolistic hold on all aspects of the goods they produced. If you owned the mines that produced coal, for example, you also bought the railroads that transported it, the refineries that prepared it for market, and the utilities that provided its end product to the general population.
As Jay-Z's career has progressed in the past dozen years, he has sought to establish a similar hold on the lifestyle market for which his music provides the soundtrack, and in which he stands as the ideal model to emulate. Rather than providing anything as tangible as coal or oil, Jay-Z, through his myriad branded investments, manufactures a way of being that makes it at least theoretically possible to never leave the world of his products. You can enjoy his music while sporting Rocawear clothing (estimated as doing $700 million a year in business), wearing one of his fragrances, and sipping his Ace of Spades champagne. You can attend his concert and end the night at one of his 40/40 nightclubs. His videos, DVDs, and CD booklets provide free exposure for all of his products, all of which, in turn, enhance every other aspect of the Jay-Z brand.
The question then becomes how, with all this marketing and glossy brand extension, does Jay-Z maintain the credibility in the hip-hop world that made him such a marketable star in the first place? "We are excited to partner with an industry giant such as Elizabeth Arden," Jay-Z declared in the press release announcing his fragrance line, which made its debut last year. No matter how deeply you've absorbed the potency of Jay-Z's mainstream reach, that sentence still makes you do a double take. This is the man who took the film American Gangster as the inspiration for his most recent album? Jigga what?
But Jay-Z believes deeply in the aspirational power of hip-hop, the notion that the music's truest fans want to see their heroes succeed and want to emulate them. He draws a sharp distinction between hip-hop and rock 'n' roll, whose stars have often expressed disdain for business and success. "I noticed that difference early on, like if you were successful in rock 'n' roll, that was a really bad thing," Jay-Z says with a laugh. "You almost had to hide it. You had these guys selling 200 million records with dirty T-shirts on. I was like, 'Come on, man. Come on. We know you're successful.'
"Hip-hop is more about attaining wealth," he continues. "People respect success. They respect big. They don't even have to like your music. If you're big enough, people are drawn to you."
Consequently, any discussion of credibility, or keeping it real, elicits a response of disbelief from him. "That's an insecure emotion," he explains. "You make your first album, you make some money, and you feel like you still have to show face, like 'I still go to the projects.' I'm like, why? Your job is to inspire people from your neighborhood to get out. You grew up there. What makes you think it's so cool?"
Of course, Jay-Z has not been immune to those insecurities himself. In 1999, he was arrested for stabbing a record executive in a New York club, and in 2001, he was charged with possession of a loaded handgun. Against his lawyer's advice, he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge in the stabbing case and was sentenced to three years' probation. The gun charge was dropped.
It's generally thought that those brushes with potential incarceration cured Jay-Z of the need to prove that he could still live the thug life. He has rapped about both of those arrests ("Put that knife in ya/Take a little bit of life from ya/Am I frightenin' ya?"), but has shown no further inclination to transform his words into deeds that would put an end to the extraordinary life he has created for himself. In fact, quite the opposite. He has been baited relentlessly by other rappers--Nas, to cite just one example, taunted "Gay-Z" for his "dick-suckin' lips"--and has responded in kind, but only in song. In real life, he has taken steps to ease those rivalries and ensure that tragedies such as the killings of Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. never happen again.
That's because too much is at stake now, far more than money or bling. At 39, Jay-Z is old enough to think about the cultural impact that hip-hop has already had, and the critical role he has played in it. "Hip-hop has done so much for racial relations, and I don't think it's given the proper credit," he says. "It has changed America immensely. I'm going to make a very bold statement: Hip-hop has done more than any leader, politician, or anyone to improve race relations.
"I'll explain why I say that," he continues. "Racism is taught in the home. We agree on that? Well, it's very hard to teach racism to a teenager who's listening to rap music and who idolizes, say, Snoop Dogg. It's hard to say, 'That guy is less than you.' The kid is like, 'I like that guy, he's cool. How is he less than me?' That's why this generation is the least racist generation ever. You see it all the time. Go to any club. People are intermingling, hanging out, having fun, enjoying the same music. Hip-hop is not just in the Bronx anymore. It's worldwide. Everywhere you go, people are listening to hip-hop and partying together. Hip-hop has done that." He pauses, as if marveling at the idea, and then repeats it for emphasis: "Hip-hop has done that."
Something else that hip-hop has done, in Jay-Z's view, is help to elect Barack Obama. "Rosa Parks sat so Martin Luther King could walk, and Martin walked so Obama could run," Jay-Z told a concert audience in the crucial swing state of Ohio shortly before the November election. "Obama is running so we all can fly, so let's fly." He recorded a get-out-the-vote message for robo calls to African-American voters during the primaries. Perhaps even more extraordinarily, after a particularly heated primary debate, Obama brushed off Hillary Clinton's attacks with a gesture of wiping lint off the shoulders of his suit, and hip observers recognized an unmistakable reference to Jay-Z's song, "Dirt Off Your Shoulder."
Jay-Z's eyes widen as he recalls that moment. "I felt like, man, what time are we living in, where a presidential nominee is making reference to a rapper?" he says. "What a beautiful place we've come to. Growing up, politics never trickled down to the areas we come from. But people from Obama's camp, and Obama himself, reached out to me and asked for my help on the campaign. We've sat and had dinner, and we've spoken on the phone. He's a very sharp guy. Very charming. Very cool.
"It's surreal," continues Jay-Z. "I couldn't imagine anything like that could happen. I didn't vote until I was an older adult. I didn't think I would ever vote, because it didn't matter who was in office. The situation never changed where we lived. Our voices weren't heard."
Jay-Z walks idly around the studio as crew members break down the set for his photo shoot. He's rapping along with a hip-hop track that's blasting in the room. When the sound system abruptly shuts off, Jay-Z continues rapping and moving to the music, like Wile E. Coyote in the moment before he looks down and realizes that he has run off the cliff. Jay-Z catches himself, looks around the room in mock surprise, and laughs. It's the sort of self-deprecating gesture he's good at, acknowledging that all eyes are on him, but humorously taking the edge off whatever intimidation factor his presence might have.
That's a quality he brings into the boardroom as well. He's far from just a figurehead or a media front man. He takes his businesses as seriously as his artistry, and he goes at both with the same level of determination. He's clear about his own views, willing to listen to others, eager to keep everybody loose and motivated, and far more interested in long-term strategy than short-term gain. Even in the current economic environment, which is challenging to say the least, he's insistent on executing his game plan rather than making changes that might not ultimately be right for his brands.
"He's smart as hell," says Neil Cole, chairman and CEO of the Iconix Brand Group, the company that bought Rocawear two years ago for more than $200 million. "He understands himself as a brand, and it's incredibly well thought out. We meet every week, and there's nothing impulsive about him. He's very consistent, and he won't settle. If something's not right, he's not going to do it for more money. He'll wait to get it right. He has a wonderful taste level about where he wants to take the brand. . .and himself."
Michael Rapino, the president and CEO of Live Nation, echoes Cole's assessment of Jay-Z. "In meeting with superstars about potential deals, there are some who spit out 'How much can I get?' and the meeting is over, because you know you're starting out on the wrong basis," he says. "When we sat down with Jay-Z, 'How much money are you going to pay me?' came up in maybe the seventh conversation. The first conversation was, 'Can we change the business together?'
"Right there, we knew we had a common agenda," continues Rapino. "It was like, 'I'm hungry. The business is changing. I'm a change agent, and I have a lot of years left.' Then the creativity flows. You don't become the best in the world at what you do, and then flip the off switch. Jay-Z wants to win. And for him it's also about the integrity of the win. He's a true partner, always looking for the win-win. He's asking, 'How do we win together?' "
Indeed, part of the refinement Jay-Z has attained entails that big-picture vision of success. It's a vision that extends beyond business and beyond music. It's about what makes your life meaningful, and it goes beyond lifestyle to a way of life. "I'm hungry for knowledge," says Jay-Z. "The whole thing is to learn every day, to get brighter and brighter. That's what this world is about. You look at someone like Gandhi, and he glowed. Martin Luther King glowed. Muhammad Ali glows. I think that's from being bright all the time, and trying to be brighter.
"That's what you should be doing your whole time on the planet," he concludes. "Then you feel like, 'My life is worth everything. And yours is too.' "
By: Anthony DeCurtis
"With education comes refinement," Jay-Z observes late one Friday afternoon. He's lounging on a couch in a studio at the Chelsea Piers Sports and Entertainment complex on the far west side of Manhattan and speaking between nibbles of a takeout salad in a plastic container and sips from a bottle of water. In his everyday speech, as in his raps, Jay-Z is inclined toward aphorisms, the compressed expression of complicated ideas, delivered with rhetorical flair. It's hard-earned wisdom, graced by a poet's touch.
He is relaxing after a typically jam-packed day that included a photo shoot, an interview, and a meeting about his potential involvement in a forthcoming video game. He celebrated his 39th birthday the night before with the staff of his Rocawear clothing line, so a mild fatigue has set in. Slender and six feet three inches tall, Jay-Z is an imposing figure, even in relative repose. He's wearing distressed jeans that hang loosely from the middle of his hips, black sneakers, and a long-sleeved black T-shirt that has replaced the pristine short-sleeved white one he wore before changing for his photo shoot. The look is studiously casual...until you glance at his left wrist and notice a diamond watch so thick it could pass for a weight band.
The winter sky is growing gray in the bank of windows behind him as the sun sets over the Hudson River. Jay-Z returns to the narrative of what, in the 19th century, would have been called his sentimental education, the education of his emotional life. That journey to refinement began in the rugged Marcy Projects in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant district, and now continues in arenas and boardrooms, in posh homes and VIP hideaways, around the world.
Jay-Z feels comfortable in all of these realms. "I've never looked at myself and said that I need to be a certain way to be around a certain sort of people," he explains. "I've always wanted to stay true to myself, and I've managed to do that. People have to accept that. I collect art, and I drink wine...things that I like that I had never been exposed to. But I never said, 'I'm going to buy art to impress this crowd.' That's just ridiculous to me. I don't live my life like that, because how could you be happy with yourself?"
Staying true to yourself might stand as a succinct summary of Jay-Z's philosophy of success. The notion goes back to Shakespeare's "To thine own self be true," and further back than that to the Greeks. But for Jay-Z, it has an urgently contemporary meaning. Even, or perhaps, especially, in recessionary times, amid the thousands of entertainment and lifestyle choices consumers have available to them, what separates winners from losers is a commitment to a single proposition: You are the product. If people believe in you, they will believe in what you create. Jay-Z understands this and is down with it.
By selling nearly 40 million albums and building a business empire that extends far beyond music into clothing, fragrances, the New Jersey Nets, sports bars, liquor, and hotels (to name just a few of his seemingly innumerable investments), Jay-Z has transformed himself into one of the most potent brands in the world. But that brand retains its power only if people remain convinced that the product they are purchasing somehow genuinely reflects Jay-Z and his tastes. As he famously put it in one of his raps, "I'm not a businessman/I'm a business, man."
"My brands are an extension of me," he says. "They're close to me. It's not like running GM, where there's no emotional attachment." The reference is apt, given the government's ongoing potential bailout of two major automobile companies. Jay-Z notes that resonance with a pause and a chuckle.
"My thing is related to who I am as a person," he says. "The clothes are an extension of me. The music is an extension of me. All my businesses are part of the culture, so I have to stay true to whatever I'm feeling at the time, whatever direction I'm heading in. And hopefully, everyone follows."
In conversation, Jay-Z's speech is slower, calmer, and more deliberate than in the propulsive, deep-voiced, and often incendiary raps that have made him a titan in the world of hip-hop, a man whose sales and staying power have elevated him above all but a handful of potential rivals. He's an engaged and animated speaker, quick to touch you in a friendly way to emphasize a point.
But as laid-back and accessible as he seems, he also exudes a calm air of confidence. He doesn't need to be aggressive or impose his will in a ham-fisted manner. Half a dozen people are floating around the studio, ready to read any sign of need or impatience on his part. He's cooperative and congenial in the way that only someone who knows he can immediately put an end to any experience that moves in an unpleasant direction can be. "Jay-Hova," he has called himself, echoing the name of the mighty, vengeful God of the Hebrew Bible. He has anointed himself the "God MC."
But he has also rapped that he "never prayed to God/I prayed to Gotti." Perhaps there is a distinction to be drawn between Jay-Z, the battle MC who to this day engages in raw exchanges with younger rappers looking to take him down, and Shawn Corey Carter, the far-sighted businessman who cofounded his own label, Roc-A-Fella Records, in 1996; who served as president and CEO of Def Jam Records from 2005 to early 2008 and helped launch the careers of Kanye West, Young Jeezy, and Rihanna; who sold his Rocawear clothing line in 2007 for $204 million, while retaining a major stake in the company; and who, following a path blazed by Madonna and U2, forged a $150 million deal last year with the concert-promotion firm Live Nation.
Last summer, Forbes ranked Jay-Z seventh on its "Celebrity 100" list of the ultrafamous and ultrapowerful. The magazine estimated his annual income at $82 million, and other sources have reported his net worth at $350 million. If that doesn't seem enviable enough, last year Jay-Z married Beyonce Knowles, one of the world's most desirable women. It is part of his attitude of ultimate cool that he never publicly talks about her.
Jay-Z moves in exclusive circles of all types. Musicians, actors, designers, politicians, captains of industry, and athletes all want to get next to him. He has developed an easygoing manner that enables him to cross these cultural boundaries in ways that make him seem accessible but still dignified, always aware of who he is. "I'm a mirror," he says. "If you're cool with me, I'm cool with you, and the exchange starts. What you see is what you reflect. If you don't like what you see, then you've done something. If I'm standoffish, that's because you are."
Occasionally, stereotypes rear their heads and uncomfortable situations arise. "It's hilarious a lot of times," he says. "You have a conversation with someone, and he's like, 'You speak so well!' I'm like, 'What do you mean? Do you understand that's an insult?' "
Growing up, however, Shawn Carter was far from the likeliest candidate for this sort of mind-boggling success. He was always recognized as bright--even today, the first word anyone who meets Jay-Z invariably uses to describe him is smart--and in the sixth grade, he tested at 12th-grade levels. But the Marcy Projects in Brooklyn were overrun by drugs and violence in the '80s. His father left the family when Carter was 11, and his mother had to raise him, his older brother, and his two older sisters. When he was 12, Carter shot his brother for stealing his jewelry. (They have since reconciled.) Carter attended high school with fellow Brooklynites the Notorious B.I.G. and Busta Rhymes, but dropped out to deal drugs in a region that extended from Brooklyn to Maryland and Virginia--as he details in his music--and to dabble in the still-nascent hip-hop game.
Along with the dealers who ran the neighborhood around the Marcy Projects, Jay-Z remembers identifying sports figures as his first models of success. "Growing up where I grew up, we looked to athletes," he recalls. "They were our first heroes. They came from the same places we came from. I mean, you can't watch TV and see someone who is successful that you can really relate to. That person isn't real, he doesn't exist. But athletes traveled the world, had these big houses, and gave their families a better life. We were like, 'Wow, that's really cool.' These guys get paid millions of dollars to play the game they love."
Around the same time that he began to identify with athletes, Carter experienced another revelation: hip-hop. He began writing nonstop in notebooks, keeping his mother and siblings awake at night as he pounded the kitchen table to create beats. He hooked up with local rapper Jaz-O, who brought him to England when he toured there. Carter recorded with Jaz-O and also with Big Daddy Kane. But despite the acknowledgment of his skills (and his growing anxiety that either violence or the law would eventually catch up with him on the streets), Carter was reluctant to give up dealing. He was rolling in a Lexus and making more money, as far as he could tell, than most rappers.
Still, he decided to take the plunge, but no record company was willing to offer him a contract. So with two partners, Carter formed Roc-A-Fella Records, and, in 1996, released his debut album, Reasonable Doubt, which established him as a major figure on the hip-hop scene. It was a heady moment, but Jay-Z barely realized it at the time. "I was naive," he recalls. "I made that album to impress my friends, so they would say, 'Oh, wow, look what you did!' It was my first album on the label that we owned. I was like, 'Okay, what happens now?' "
What happened was that Jay-Z left drug dealing behind and began to build his empire, moving steadily from "grams to Grammys" as he puts it in one song. But the process wasn't easy. The treachery of life on the streets, where he faced bullets at close range, turned out to be nothing compared with what he would encounter in the upper echelons of the music business. "I come from a world that's completely different from the music industry, and it wasn't recognizable to me at all," he says. "I come from a place where you had to keep your word, where people would stick with you no matter what. That's impossible in the music business, where if you're not hot, people are not talking to you. I just tried to be a man of my word."
The choice of Roc-A-Fella as his label's name would prove telling. On one hand, it's standard hip-hop braggadocio to establish a connection between a fledgling rapper and one of the richest and most powerful families in American history. But it also suggested the means through which Jay-Z would eventually establish his own business empire. The Rockefeller family and other 19th-century industrialists established a monopolistic hold on all aspects of the goods they produced. If you owned the mines that produced coal, for example, you also bought the railroads that transported it, the refineries that prepared it for market, and the utilities that provided its end product to the general population.
As Jay-Z's career has progressed in the past dozen years, he has sought to establish a similar hold on the lifestyle market for which his music provides the soundtrack, and in which he stands as the ideal model to emulate. Rather than providing anything as tangible as coal or oil, Jay-Z, through his myriad branded investments, manufactures a way of being that makes it at least theoretically possible to never leave the world of his products. You can enjoy his music while sporting Rocawear clothing (estimated as doing $700 million a year in business), wearing one of his fragrances, and sipping his Ace of Spades champagne. You can attend his concert and end the night at one of his 40/40 nightclubs. His videos, DVDs, and CD booklets provide free exposure for all of his products, all of which, in turn, enhance every other aspect of the Jay-Z brand.
The question then becomes how, with all this marketing and glossy brand extension, does Jay-Z maintain the credibility in the hip-hop world that made him such a marketable star in the first place? "We are excited to partner with an industry giant such as Elizabeth Arden," Jay-Z declared in the press release announcing his fragrance line, which made its debut last year. No matter how deeply you've absorbed the potency of Jay-Z's mainstream reach, that sentence still makes you do a double take. This is the man who took the film American Gangster as the inspiration for his most recent album? Jigga what?
But Jay-Z believes deeply in the aspirational power of hip-hop, the notion that the music's truest fans want to see their heroes succeed and want to emulate them. He draws a sharp distinction between hip-hop and rock 'n' roll, whose stars have often expressed disdain for business and success. "I noticed that difference early on, like if you were successful in rock 'n' roll, that was a really bad thing," Jay-Z says with a laugh. "You almost had to hide it. You had these guys selling 200 million records with dirty T-shirts on. I was like, 'Come on, man. Come on. We know you're successful.'
"Hip-hop is more about attaining wealth," he continues. "People respect success. They respect big. They don't even have to like your music. If you're big enough, people are drawn to you."
Consequently, any discussion of credibility, or keeping it real, elicits a response of disbelief from him. "That's an insecure emotion," he explains. "You make your first album, you make some money, and you feel like you still have to show face, like 'I still go to the projects.' I'm like, why? Your job is to inspire people from your neighborhood to get out. You grew up there. What makes you think it's so cool?"
Of course, Jay-Z has not been immune to those insecurities himself. In 1999, he was arrested for stabbing a record executive in a New York club, and in 2001, he was charged with possession of a loaded handgun. Against his lawyer's advice, he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge in the stabbing case and was sentenced to three years' probation. The gun charge was dropped.
It's generally thought that those brushes with potential incarceration cured Jay-Z of the need to prove that he could still live the thug life. He has rapped about both of those arrests ("Put that knife in ya/Take a little bit of life from ya/Am I frightenin' ya?"), but has shown no further inclination to transform his words into deeds that would put an end to the extraordinary life he has created for himself. In fact, quite the opposite. He has been baited relentlessly by other rappers--Nas, to cite just one example, taunted "Gay-Z" for his "dick-suckin' lips"--and has responded in kind, but only in song. In real life, he has taken steps to ease those rivalries and ensure that tragedies such as the killings of Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. never happen again.
That's because too much is at stake now, far more than money or bling. At 39, Jay-Z is old enough to think about the cultural impact that hip-hop has already had, and the critical role he has played in it. "Hip-hop has done so much for racial relations, and I don't think it's given the proper credit," he says. "It has changed America immensely. I'm going to make a very bold statement: Hip-hop has done more than any leader, politician, or anyone to improve race relations.
"I'll explain why I say that," he continues. "Racism is taught in the home. We agree on that? Well, it's very hard to teach racism to a teenager who's listening to rap music and who idolizes, say, Snoop Dogg. It's hard to say, 'That guy is less than you.' The kid is like, 'I like that guy, he's cool. How is he less than me?' That's why this generation is the least racist generation ever. You see it all the time. Go to any club. People are intermingling, hanging out, having fun, enjoying the same music. Hip-hop is not just in the Bronx anymore. It's worldwide. Everywhere you go, people are listening to hip-hop and partying together. Hip-hop has done that." He pauses, as if marveling at the idea, and then repeats it for emphasis: "Hip-hop has done that."
Something else that hip-hop has done, in Jay-Z's view, is help to elect Barack Obama. "Rosa Parks sat so Martin Luther King could walk, and Martin walked so Obama could run," Jay-Z told a concert audience in the crucial swing state of Ohio shortly before the November election. "Obama is running so we all can fly, so let's fly." He recorded a get-out-the-vote message for robo calls to African-American voters during the primaries. Perhaps even more extraordinarily, after a particularly heated primary debate, Obama brushed off Hillary Clinton's attacks with a gesture of wiping lint off the shoulders of his suit, and hip observers recognized an unmistakable reference to Jay-Z's song, "Dirt Off Your Shoulder."
Jay-Z's eyes widen as he recalls that moment. "I felt like, man, what time are we living in, where a presidential nominee is making reference to a rapper?" he says. "What a beautiful place we've come to. Growing up, politics never trickled down to the areas we come from. But people from Obama's camp, and Obama himself, reached out to me and asked for my help on the campaign. We've sat and had dinner, and we've spoken on the phone. He's a very sharp guy. Very charming. Very cool.
"It's surreal," continues Jay-Z. "I couldn't imagine anything like that could happen. I didn't vote until I was an older adult. I didn't think I would ever vote, because it didn't matter who was in office. The situation never changed where we lived. Our voices weren't heard."
Jay-Z walks idly around the studio as crew members break down the set for his photo shoot. He's rapping along with a hip-hop track that's blasting in the room. When the sound system abruptly shuts off, Jay-Z continues rapping and moving to the music, like Wile E. Coyote in the moment before he looks down and realizes that he has run off the cliff. Jay-Z catches himself, looks around the room in mock surprise, and laughs. It's the sort of self-deprecating gesture he's good at, acknowledging that all eyes are on him, but humorously taking the edge off whatever intimidation factor his presence might have.
That's a quality he brings into the boardroom as well. He's far from just a figurehead or a media front man. He takes his businesses as seriously as his artistry, and he goes at both with the same level of determination. He's clear about his own views, willing to listen to others, eager to keep everybody loose and motivated, and far more interested in long-term strategy than short-term gain. Even in the current economic environment, which is challenging to say the least, he's insistent on executing his game plan rather than making changes that might not ultimately be right for his brands.
"He's smart as hell," says Neil Cole, chairman and CEO of the Iconix Brand Group, the company that bought Rocawear two years ago for more than $200 million. "He understands himself as a brand, and it's incredibly well thought out. We meet every week, and there's nothing impulsive about him. He's very consistent, and he won't settle. If something's not right, he's not going to do it for more money. He'll wait to get it right. He has a wonderful taste level about where he wants to take the brand. . .and himself."
Michael Rapino, the president and CEO of Live Nation, echoes Cole's assessment of Jay-Z. "In meeting with superstars about potential deals, there are some who spit out 'How much can I get?' and the meeting is over, because you know you're starting out on the wrong basis," he says. "When we sat down with Jay-Z, 'How much money are you going to pay me?' came up in maybe the seventh conversation. The first conversation was, 'Can we change the business together?'
"Right there, we knew we had a common agenda," continues Rapino. "It was like, 'I'm hungry. The business is changing. I'm a change agent, and I have a lot of years left.' Then the creativity flows. You don't become the best in the world at what you do, and then flip the off switch. Jay-Z wants to win. And for him it's also about the integrity of the win. He's a true partner, always looking for the win-win. He's asking, 'How do we win together?' "
Indeed, part of the refinement Jay-Z has attained entails that big-picture vision of success. It's a vision that extends beyond business and beyond music. It's about what makes your life meaningful, and it goes beyond lifestyle to a way of life. "I'm hungry for knowledge," says Jay-Z. "The whole thing is to learn every day, to get brighter and brighter. That's what this world is about. You look at someone like Gandhi, and he glowed. Martin Luther King glowed. Muhammad Ali glows. I think that's from being bright all the time, and trying to be brighter.
"That's what you should be doing your whole time on the planet," he concludes. "Then you feel like, 'My life is worth everything. And yours is too.' "
Labels: Business, Entrepreneur, Hip Hop, Hustle, Strategy
Saturday, February 14, 2009,10:01 PM
The old devil
by ANDREW DAVIDSON
Felix Dennis, former counter-culture icon and now full-time millionaire, is behaving badly.
"Bring me some fucking beer, Marie-France," he bellows from one end of the garden to the next, across the tennis court, over the ornamental pond, past the rolling lawns. Marie-France, a tall, angular woman who seems to be operating as chatelaine at his Warwickshire manor, pops her head out of the kitchen door and nods. Two other women lounge in the sun on the terrace, giggling as we go past.
Dennis, 48, short, bearded and bristling with aggressive energy, seems to have been on edge for hours. Perhaps it's the heat scorching the leaves of his beloved trees, or a hangover - Dennis is a man with a mountainous appetite and a large wine collection. Despite his Panama hat, top-to-toe linen and warp-around shades, he's sweating profusely, and spends the first five minutes of our meeting harrumphing around his sitting room saying he is going to hit someone because he cannot find the window lock keys.
Dennis is usually smooth and funny, say his friends, but on days like this you would think he has barely mellowed since his celebrated appearance as a defendant in the Oz magazine trial 24 years ago. He is talking fast and lewd, like a lubricious satyr, and guzzling tea, cigarettes, beer and sandwiches. "Try these, Andrew, try these," he exhorts. For all his occasional prickliness, Dennis is, by reputation, the sort of sentimental millionaire who waits for the "And finally" items on News at Ten and then sends off an anonymous cheque.
We start the afternoon in the pin-neat sitting-room of his thatched, picture-postcard manor near Stratford-on-Avon. Dennis, you would guess, has bought into the myth: topiaried yew and York stone, exposed beams, leaded windows and antiques. It's beautiful, but too neat, a house full of those fussy flower arrangements you only get in glossy magazines. You have to go upstairs to get a sense of his real playfulness. On the wall of his study there's a large Hockney, and a Warhol outside, and next door the Egyptian bathroom, which is decked out with pharaohs and hieroglyphics. But everywhere, everything is tidy. Tidiness is one of his obsessions.
All somewhat different, of course, from his mouldy hippie days, when even his friends complained about the state of his hygiene. At that stage, Dennis the menacing millionaire was but a glint in his own eye. Then came the moment when he, Richard Neville and Jim Anderson were charged with producing a magazine designed to "corrupt the morals of children". They spent only a few days in jail, but earned lifelong notoriety after the most famous obscenity trial of the Seventies.
Back then, Dennis told the High Court that, hey man, money corrupts, even though he was already frightening his hippie friends with his aggressive commercial instincts. He also, famously, got a shorter sentence than his co-defendants because the trial judge, Michael Argyle, who was later found to have misdirected the jury, thought he was "less intelligent". Ha! Now he is worth somewhere between pounds 110 million and pounds 200million, has residences in London, Warwickshire, New York, Connecticut and Mustique, and has reached that stage when multi-millionaires start to think of posterity and take to building gardens and setting things straight.
So, while Dennis is normally a man who keeps his head below the parapet - overseeing his stake in a large computer accessories business in America, running his British magazine empire, and generally enjoying his wealth, you might say, rather than building it - recently he has been popping up all over the place. Earlier this summer, he extracted a crawling apology and an out-of-court settlement from the Spectator after it rehashed the whole Oz affair on the back of Richard Neville's new memoir, Hippie Hippie Shake. The Spectator had printed a piece by Michael Argyle which intimated that the Oz team had peddled drugs to schoolchildren and fully deserved their jail sentence. The pounds 10,000 Dennis extracted went to charity. Easy money, and he could have asked for a lot more.
Vengeance at last? Dennis laughs: "And the Lord saith, vengeance is mine!" But it isn't quite. He has wisely backed off suing Argyle himself. "Oh, I don't want to make him a martyr of the Right: there's no glory to be had in suing an 80-year-old man and taking his house away from him. It was just a totally obvious libel." Argyle, however, had been repeating it for years, ever since he left the bench; and everyone who knows Dennis says the trial judgment ("less intelligent") has always nagged at him - so was he just biding his time? "I never wait," he says tartly. "I've got better things to do than wait." (Argyle declines to give his side. "I have absolutely nothing to say about that man," he told me.)
Now Dennis has other fish to fry. Last month, after buying David Bowie's Mustique estate for pounds 5 million, he emerged as one of the main backers of Spiked, a new fortnightly rival to Private Eye produced by the Scallywag team. Those with long memories will recall that the original Oz carried a Spike section and that, back in the late Sixties, the Aussie hippies that ran Oz and the British public school satirists on Private Eye loathed each other for most of the time.
So is Dennis - Surbiton-born but, he claims, "an honorary Australian" - just settling old scores? No, he laughs, pacing the room. "We used to say rude things about them and they used to say rude things about us but, when push came to shove, they waded in when we were in the shit and I've got to thank them for it."
It seems a funny form of gratitude. But Private Eye, he says, has gone soft, and he likes the mischief of the Scallywag team. Scallywag, of course, is best known for the furore it caused printing rumours of a relationship between John Major and his caterer, Clare Latimer. Dennis says he has put "a substantial sum" into the new title - less than pounds 100,000 - and doesn't care if he gets any return on it. But he hasn't become a director, and so cannot be sued for anything it prints.
The Scallywag team says his move encouraged four other investors to reach into their pockets, but it will be interesting to note if Dennis's involvement, even at arm's length, now makes him a target for Private Eye. If he is worried, he is not showing it. "With all due deference to Ian Hislop, he is a lot better on television than he is in the editor's chair at Private Eye. It's become part of the Establishment now."
Part of the Establishment? That seems a bit rich from a man setting himself up as landed gentry, but Dennis, if you hadn't realised it by now, is a master of contradictions. He built his fortune out of adroit investments, first in Bruce Lee kung fu books, then one-shot poster magazines, computer titles (Personal Computer World, MacUser, PCPro) and, most profitably, in an American software company called Micro Warehouse Inc. Yet he has never moved easily among the publishing plutocracy.
He describes himself as a "contrarian", but thought nothing of threatening to get the Spectator, that most contrarian of magazines, pulled from every newsagent, a move which many thought extraordinary behaviour from someone who used to complain about the "pigs" harassing Oz. He explains that he just had to put the record straight for his mum's sake. His mother brought Dennis and his brother up single-handed after his father walked out; she is installed in a farmhouse on his estate and, at 76, still exerts a strong influence.
Despite the trappings of the self-made man, there is still a restless iconoclasm about him, as if he despises the club he has worked so hard to join. Some believe he is constantly at war with himself: his old hedonistic, hippie side never coming to terms with his single-minded drive to prove himself. Prove himself as what? Intelligent? An achiever?
He obviously has a knack. His old friend and lawyer, Michael Nixon, says it is simply a remarkable eye for what will sell. "He's incredibly foresighted; he always knows what the public wants to buy." He cites Dennis's early move into computer magazines and now periodicals on CD-Rom. But others note that these days Dennis is ambivalent about business. He has dabbed his toe in the mainstream magazine market with the launch of Maxim, the young men's title, but it is a crowded sector and it is unclear how much he wants to build on its early success.
He does love his wealth, though. He drags me to the kitchen to look at his cheques to the Inland Revenue, copies of which are pinned behind the door: they are for pounds 2 million, pounds 1 million and pounds 900,000. Next to the cheques are an array of photos of Felix with female friends spilling out of swimsuits. His fondness for women is well- known. "But you know," says one friend, "they are all long-term relationships. If you go to his place, you see the same people there year after year."
Isn't he ever tempted to settle down and have children? "You realise how many hairless monkeys there are?" he retorts, looking horrified. The "hairless monkey" line is a favourite of Dennis's, which he uses to explain everything from motivation to morality. "I am gutless," he continues. "I haven't got the courage. How these people can just casually have children which, if they are any kind of responsible human being, will utterly transform their life forever, is totally beyond me. I know it would take over my life."
Some say that, because his Dad walked out when he was young, he married money-making instead; others, that it is a hangover from the innate misogyny which characterised the hippie scene of the late Sixties. Crap, responds the artist George Snow, an old friend: "Felix was the first guy on the block to be a 'new man'. His company had female publishers, editors, designers way before anyone else." He is also, by repute, extraordinary loyal to his friends, both male and female. When I ask Dennis, impertinently, if he has to sleep with all his female friends, he looks genuinely upset, as if I couldn't have got him more wrong. No, he replies - but there remains an edge to our conversation. When I ask if he is surprised at how wealthy he has become, he seizes on it. "And when did you stop beating your wife, eh? Eh? It's the John Lennon question, isn't it? How did a git like you get from there to here, right? Right?" Yeah, sure, right. At this stage, I am beginning to estimate the distance between my chair and the door.
But that's just Dennis: he gives as good as he gets. The next minute he is explaining to me why he was useless at school. He had never told anyone this before, he says, but the defining moment of his childhood was when, aged 13-and-a-half, a relative gave him a bunch of records from America. Till then young Felix had been doing fine at school. So one night, after his mother had gone to bed, he says he sneaked the records on to the radiogram. "And I can tell you what it was, and who it was, and for the next five years it was all I was."
Dennis then leaps up, pushing his face so close I can see the beads of perspiration, and screams, "If you hear me howlin', howlin' for my darlin', oooooohhhh, oooooohhh, oooooohhh, weee!" in a pretty passable imitation of the blues singer Howling Wolf. Dennis, by all accounts an ace singer and drummer, could have gone into the music business. The thing is, he says, he could always imitate other singers, but didn't have a voice of his own.
Richard Neville's Hippie Hippie Shake puts a different spin on his ambitions, with Dennis turning up on the Oz doorstep demanding royalties for a tape he'd sent in, apparently penniless after selling his drum kit to pay for a girlfriend's abortion. Dennis's huge libido is one of the book's running jokes. When I ask him, tongue-in-cheek, if he is even more attractive to women now that he is rich and famous, he answers, rather po-faced, "I think you will find, reading Richard's book, that I had no trouble in that department ever. I am a ladies' man." Then he lets out a barking laugh. "'Course I am attractive because I am rich! They want the money! That's not female psychology; that's hairless monkey psychology!"
Anyway, he lost his youth to the blues. His father, a jazz pianist and bomber navigator in the War, had left for Australia when he was three. The thought of another budding musician must have given his mother the shivers, he says. His father did try to contact him, much later, when he was older, but he rebuffed him. He also put his mum through quite a lot - expulsions, academic failure, dropping out - while his brother was the complete opposite, very quiet and straight; he became a master lens grinder, but currently works for his big brother.
Dennis ducks and dives when he's asked what now motivates him. He told a recent, fawning Central TV documentary that the secret of his success was easy to encapsulate: "Dear Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz! My friends all drive Porsches. . ." So what does he do all day? He spends a few days in the country, a few in town, a week in America, keeping an eye on his businesses. "My guiding principle is, 'I know a man who can', and I let them get on with it," he says cheerfully.
Right now he is occupied with Blender, Britain's first CD-Rom only magazine. "It's sensational," he says, leading me up to his study. Halfway there, he taps an oil painting of a bullock. "Vermeer," he says, waggling his eyebrows. Funny - surely Vermeer never painted cattle. "Wait till you see this," he continues, and switches on his AppleMac. "It will knock your socks off."
The disc has five hours of interactive TV, with pop features, movie reviews and star profiles. You flick from one to another, and it talks, it moves, it sings. Great, but where's the portability? You have to be plugged in to use it. That will all come, says Dennis, excited as a kid with a new trainset, and, when it does, his company will be at the forefront. The irony is, he doesn't much like computers, and has never been that computer- literate. But he knows a revolution when he sees one.
Beyond his study window, the Vale of Evesham rolls off towards the Cotswolds. There is a whisper among his friends that, as well as building a large estate - he buys anything that moves around Dorsington, then hands it over to the farming family running it all for him - he also wants to build his own mausoleum, a strangely morbid aim for someone not yet 50. Intimations of mortality? Perhaps. He has already had one dice with death. "You're looking", he explains, "at the only survivor of Legionnaires disease you will ever see." He caught it in America, in 1989. He remembers the doctor in Connecticut who saved his life continually shaking him and saying: "It's really simple. You're over 40 years old. You obviously smoke, you drink like a fish, and probably take illegal drugs. You have contracted legionella and, if you go to sleep, you are probably going to die." He stayed awake. Now he describes what's left of his life as "bonus time".
He says he has grown tired of the manor and all the houses in the village he has bought for guests, and moans that he never gets any peace. The new plan is to build another mansion from a barn half a mile up the road. He has already planted beside it a maze spelling the name "Oz", with the "O" as the centre. "This", he says, gesturing round the old manor, "is going to be my day-house." The two will be linked by the gardens and woods he is creating.
Is he happy? Today, at least, it seems that you could spend hours with him and never really get to grips with what he is about. "Oh, what a question," he explodes, slapping his thigh. "People always want me to say I am miserable. I am not miserable!" He is shouting. "You know, I have lived, and continue to live, the life of Reilly. I have, all my life. I have never clocked in, never said 'yes, sir'. I don't wake up feeling miserable. I do whatever I fucking well want every day of my life. I always have - and it isn't the money. I did the same without the money!"
Yet, I add piously, you need others to clock in to maintain your empire.
"And Amen to that!" he yells
Felix Dennis, former counter-culture icon and now full-time millionaire, is behaving badly.
"Bring me some fucking beer, Marie-France," he bellows from one end of the garden to the next, across the tennis court, over the ornamental pond, past the rolling lawns. Marie-France, a tall, angular woman who seems to be operating as chatelaine at his Warwickshire manor, pops her head out of the kitchen door and nods. Two other women lounge in the sun on the terrace, giggling as we go past.
Dennis, 48, short, bearded and bristling with aggressive energy, seems to have been on edge for hours. Perhaps it's the heat scorching the leaves of his beloved trees, or a hangover - Dennis is a man with a mountainous appetite and a large wine collection. Despite his Panama hat, top-to-toe linen and warp-around shades, he's sweating profusely, and spends the first five minutes of our meeting harrumphing around his sitting room saying he is going to hit someone because he cannot find the window lock keys.
Dennis is usually smooth and funny, say his friends, but on days like this you would think he has barely mellowed since his celebrated appearance as a defendant in the Oz magazine trial 24 years ago. He is talking fast and lewd, like a lubricious satyr, and guzzling tea, cigarettes, beer and sandwiches. "Try these, Andrew, try these," he exhorts. For all his occasional prickliness, Dennis is, by reputation, the sort of sentimental millionaire who waits for the "And finally" items on News at Ten and then sends off an anonymous cheque.
We start the afternoon in the pin-neat sitting-room of his thatched, picture-postcard manor near Stratford-on-Avon. Dennis, you would guess, has bought into the myth: topiaried yew and York stone, exposed beams, leaded windows and antiques. It's beautiful, but too neat, a house full of those fussy flower arrangements you only get in glossy magazines. You have to go upstairs to get a sense of his real playfulness. On the wall of his study there's a large Hockney, and a Warhol outside, and next door the Egyptian bathroom, which is decked out with pharaohs and hieroglyphics. But everywhere, everything is tidy. Tidiness is one of his obsessions.
All somewhat different, of course, from his mouldy hippie days, when even his friends complained about the state of his hygiene. At that stage, Dennis the menacing millionaire was but a glint in his own eye. Then came the moment when he, Richard Neville and Jim Anderson were charged with producing a magazine designed to "corrupt the morals of children". They spent only a few days in jail, but earned lifelong notoriety after the most famous obscenity trial of the Seventies.
Back then, Dennis told the High Court that, hey man, money corrupts, even though he was already frightening his hippie friends with his aggressive commercial instincts. He also, famously, got a shorter sentence than his co-defendants because the trial judge, Michael Argyle, who was later found to have misdirected the jury, thought he was "less intelligent". Ha! Now he is worth somewhere between pounds 110 million and pounds 200million, has residences in London, Warwickshire, New York, Connecticut and Mustique, and has reached that stage when multi-millionaires start to think of posterity and take to building gardens and setting things straight.
So, while Dennis is normally a man who keeps his head below the parapet - overseeing his stake in a large computer accessories business in America, running his British magazine empire, and generally enjoying his wealth, you might say, rather than building it - recently he has been popping up all over the place. Earlier this summer, he extracted a crawling apology and an out-of-court settlement from the Spectator after it rehashed the whole Oz affair on the back of Richard Neville's new memoir, Hippie Hippie Shake. The Spectator had printed a piece by Michael Argyle which intimated that the Oz team had peddled drugs to schoolchildren and fully deserved their jail sentence. The pounds 10,000 Dennis extracted went to charity. Easy money, and he could have asked for a lot more.
Vengeance at last? Dennis laughs: "And the Lord saith, vengeance is mine!" But it isn't quite. He has wisely backed off suing Argyle himself. "Oh, I don't want to make him a martyr of the Right: there's no glory to be had in suing an 80-year-old man and taking his house away from him. It was just a totally obvious libel." Argyle, however, had been repeating it for years, ever since he left the bench; and everyone who knows Dennis says the trial judgment ("less intelligent") has always nagged at him - so was he just biding his time? "I never wait," he says tartly. "I've got better things to do than wait." (Argyle declines to give his side. "I have absolutely nothing to say about that man," he told me.)
Now Dennis has other fish to fry. Last month, after buying David Bowie's Mustique estate for pounds 5 million, he emerged as one of the main backers of Spiked, a new fortnightly rival to Private Eye produced by the Scallywag team. Those with long memories will recall that the original Oz carried a Spike section and that, back in the late Sixties, the Aussie hippies that ran Oz and the British public school satirists on Private Eye loathed each other for most of the time.
So is Dennis - Surbiton-born but, he claims, "an honorary Australian" - just settling old scores? No, he laughs, pacing the room. "We used to say rude things about them and they used to say rude things about us but, when push came to shove, they waded in when we were in the shit and I've got to thank them for it."
It seems a funny form of gratitude. But Private Eye, he says, has gone soft, and he likes the mischief of the Scallywag team. Scallywag, of course, is best known for the furore it caused printing rumours of a relationship between John Major and his caterer, Clare Latimer. Dennis says he has put "a substantial sum" into the new title - less than pounds 100,000 - and doesn't care if he gets any return on it. But he hasn't become a director, and so cannot be sued for anything it prints.
The Scallywag team says his move encouraged four other investors to reach into their pockets, but it will be interesting to note if Dennis's involvement, even at arm's length, now makes him a target for Private Eye. If he is worried, he is not showing it. "With all due deference to Ian Hislop, he is a lot better on television than he is in the editor's chair at Private Eye. It's become part of the Establishment now."
Part of the Establishment? That seems a bit rich from a man setting himself up as landed gentry, but Dennis, if you hadn't realised it by now, is a master of contradictions. He built his fortune out of adroit investments, first in Bruce Lee kung fu books, then one-shot poster magazines, computer titles (Personal Computer World, MacUser, PCPro) and, most profitably, in an American software company called Micro Warehouse Inc. Yet he has never moved easily among the publishing plutocracy.
He describes himself as a "contrarian", but thought nothing of threatening to get the Spectator, that most contrarian of magazines, pulled from every newsagent, a move which many thought extraordinary behaviour from someone who used to complain about the "pigs" harassing Oz. He explains that he just had to put the record straight for his mum's sake. His mother brought Dennis and his brother up single-handed after his father walked out; she is installed in a farmhouse on his estate and, at 76, still exerts a strong influence.
Despite the trappings of the self-made man, there is still a restless iconoclasm about him, as if he despises the club he has worked so hard to join. Some believe he is constantly at war with himself: his old hedonistic, hippie side never coming to terms with his single-minded drive to prove himself. Prove himself as what? Intelligent? An achiever?
He obviously has a knack. His old friend and lawyer, Michael Nixon, says it is simply a remarkable eye for what will sell. "He's incredibly foresighted; he always knows what the public wants to buy." He cites Dennis's early move into computer magazines and now periodicals on CD-Rom. But others note that these days Dennis is ambivalent about business. He has dabbed his toe in the mainstream magazine market with the launch of Maxim, the young men's title, but it is a crowded sector and it is unclear how much he wants to build on its early success.
He does love his wealth, though. He drags me to the kitchen to look at his cheques to the Inland Revenue, copies of which are pinned behind the door: they are for pounds 2 million, pounds 1 million and pounds 900,000. Next to the cheques are an array of photos of Felix with female friends spilling out of swimsuits. His fondness for women is well- known. "But you know," says one friend, "they are all long-term relationships. If you go to his place, you see the same people there year after year."
Isn't he ever tempted to settle down and have children? "You realise how many hairless monkeys there are?" he retorts, looking horrified. The "hairless monkey" line is a favourite of Dennis's, which he uses to explain everything from motivation to morality. "I am gutless," he continues. "I haven't got the courage. How these people can just casually have children which, if they are any kind of responsible human being, will utterly transform their life forever, is totally beyond me. I know it would take over my life."
Some say that, because his Dad walked out when he was young, he married money-making instead; others, that it is a hangover from the innate misogyny which characterised the hippie scene of the late Sixties. Crap, responds the artist George Snow, an old friend: "Felix was the first guy on the block to be a 'new man'. His company had female publishers, editors, designers way before anyone else." He is also, by repute, extraordinary loyal to his friends, both male and female. When I ask Dennis, impertinently, if he has to sleep with all his female friends, he looks genuinely upset, as if I couldn't have got him more wrong. No, he replies - but there remains an edge to our conversation. When I ask if he is surprised at how wealthy he has become, he seizes on it. "And when did you stop beating your wife, eh? Eh? It's the John Lennon question, isn't it? How did a git like you get from there to here, right? Right?" Yeah, sure, right. At this stage, I am beginning to estimate the distance between my chair and the door.
But that's just Dennis: he gives as good as he gets. The next minute he is explaining to me why he was useless at school. He had never told anyone this before, he says, but the defining moment of his childhood was when, aged 13-and-a-half, a relative gave him a bunch of records from America. Till then young Felix had been doing fine at school. So one night, after his mother had gone to bed, he says he sneaked the records on to the radiogram. "And I can tell you what it was, and who it was, and for the next five years it was all I was."
Dennis then leaps up, pushing his face so close I can see the beads of perspiration, and screams, "If you hear me howlin', howlin' for my darlin', oooooohhhh, oooooohhh, oooooohhh, weee!" in a pretty passable imitation of the blues singer Howling Wolf. Dennis, by all accounts an ace singer and drummer, could have gone into the music business. The thing is, he says, he could always imitate other singers, but didn't have a voice of his own.
Richard Neville's Hippie Hippie Shake puts a different spin on his ambitions, with Dennis turning up on the Oz doorstep demanding royalties for a tape he'd sent in, apparently penniless after selling his drum kit to pay for a girlfriend's abortion. Dennis's huge libido is one of the book's running jokes. When I ask him, tongue-in-cheek, if he is even more attractive to women now that he is rich and famous, he answers, rather po-faced, "I think you will find, reading Richard's book, that I had no trouble in that department ever. I am a ladies' man." Then he lets out a barking laugh. "'Course I am attractive because I am rich! They want the money! That's not female psychology; that's hairless monkey psychology!"
Anyway, he lost his youth to the blues. His father, a jazz pianist and bomber navigator in the War, had left for Australia when he was three. The thought of another budding musician must have given his mother the shivers, he says. His father did try to contact him, much later, when he was older, but he rebuffed him. He also put his mum through quite a lot - expulsions, academic failure, dropping out - while his brother was the complete opposite, very quiet and straight; he became a master lens grinder, but currently works for his big brother.
Dennis ducks and dives when he's asked what now motivates him. He told a recent, fawning Central TV documentary that the secret of his success was easy to encapsulate: "Dear Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz! My friends all drive Porsches. . ." So what does he do all day? He spends a few days in the country, a few in town, a week in America, keeping an eye on his businesses. "My guiding principle is, 'I know a man who can', and I let them get on with it," he says cheerfully.
Right now he is occupied with Blender, Britain's first CD-Rom only magazine. "It's sensational," he says, leading me up to his study. Halfway there, he taps an oil painting of a bullock. "Vermeer," he says, waggling his eyebrows. Funny - surely Vermeer never painted cattle. "Wait till you see this," he continues, and switches on his AppleMac. "It will knock your socks off."
The disc has five hours of interactive TV, with pop features, movie reviews and star profiles. You flick from one to another, and it talks, it moves, it sings. Great, but where's the portability? You have to be plugged in to use it. That will all come, says Dennis, excited as a kid with a new trainset, and, when it does, his company will be at the forefront. The irony is, he doesn't much like computers, and has never been that computer- literate. But he knows a revolution when he sees one.
Beyond his study window, the Vale of Evesham rolls off towards the Cotswolds. There is a whisper among his friends that, as well as building a large estate - he buys anything that moves around Dorsington, then hands it over to the farming family running it all for him - he also wants to build his own mausoleum, a strangely morbid aim for someone not yet 50. Intimations of mortality? Perhaps. He has already had one dice with death. "You're looking", he explains, "at the only survivor of Legionnaires disease you will ever see." He caught it in America, in 1989. He remembers the doctor in Connecticut who saved his life continually shaking him and saying: "It's really simple. You're over 40 years old. You obviously smoke, you drink like a fish, and probably take illegal drugs. You have contracted legionella and, if you go to sleep, you are probably going to die." He stayed awake. Now he describes what's left of his life as "bonus time".
He says he has grown tired of the manor and all the houses in the village he has bought for guests, and moans that he never gets any peace. The new plan is to build another mansion from a barn half a mile up the road. He has already planted beside it a maze spelling the name "Oz", with the "O" as the centre. "This", he says, gesturing round the old manor, "is going to be my day-house." The two will be linked by the gardens and woods he is creating.
Is he happy? Today, at least, it seems that you could spend hours with him and never really get to grips with what he is about. "Oh, what a question," he explodes, slapping his thigh. "People always want me to say I am miserable. I am not miserable!" He is shouting. "You know, I have lived, and continue to live, the life of Reilly. I have, all my life. I have never clocked in, never said 'yes, sir'. I don't wake up feeling miserable. I do whatever I fucking well want every day of my life. I always have - and it isn't the money. I did the same without the money!"
Yet, I add piously, you need others to clock in to maintain your empire.
"And Amen to that!" he yells
Labels: Entrepreneur, Interesting Individuals, Strategy, Stuff
Saturday, November 01, 2008,5:55 PM
A psychologist helps repackage Democrats' message
By Shaila Dewan and Robbie Brown
ATLANTA: Democrats up and down the ballot have been trying to reverse the Republican rhetorical dominance that made "liberal" an unsavory label, and many have found help in a slender document percolating through their party's hierarchy.
It is called the "Message Handbook for Progressives From Left to Center," and, along with a companion piece on health care, it was created by Drew Westen, a psychology professor at Emory University here who was virtually unknown in political circles before this election cycle. Several Democratic consultants say it is the first systematic, data-driven effort to mold the language of the left to fit the sensibilities of the center.
Dr. Westen's advice can be heard when Alisha Thomas Morgan, running for re-election to the Georgia House in a conservative suburb of Atlanta, uses the word "leadership" in place of "government" and speaks about the middle class instead of the poor.
Or when Andrew Gillum, a city commissioner in Tallahassee, Florida, who is fighting a ballot initiative against same-sex marriage, tells members of his predominantly black church of the human desire for dignity and respect instead of lecturing them on the evils of discrimination.
Democrats of higher office who have heard Dr. Westen have also shifted their rhetoric, as when Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, fending off a Republican challenger, not only says that "health care is a right for every citizen" but pointedly adds, "Particularly citizens who are working hard every day."
Dr. Westen advises jettisoning wonkish 12-point plans in favor of direct emotional appeals that can compete with those evoked by Republicans using terms like "family values" and "the war on terror."
"We are a centrist nation," he said in an interview, "but people prefer center-left to center-right, even in conservative parts of the country, if they hear equally strong messages on both sides."
Liberal candidates, especially those running in not-so-liberal territory, have latched on to his approach.
"There's almost a rebirth, or a pride, that we can really talk about what we believe and not do so shamefully," Gillum said, adding that Dr. Westen's advice had given him the confidence to speak his mind even on conservative talk radio. "If we communicate it through our stories and our real-life examples, if they don't agree with you then they can at least understand where you come from."
Dr. Westen's ideas began to catch on when he was writing "The Political Brain," a scientific explanation of the central role of emotion in politics, published in 2007, that urged Democrats to stop cowering and fight back.
Among those with whom he has had audiences are Howard Dean, the Democratic national chairman, and Young Elected Officials, a national group of left-leaning city council members and state legislators. During the primaries, Senator Joseph Biden Jr., now Senator Barack Obama's running mate, recommended "The Political Brain" to his campaign staff. Bill Clinton is a fan.
Even Frank Luntz, the architect of many Republican rhetorical successes, says Dr. Westen is fostering a sea change.
"It's as though the Republicans have fallen back 15 years in their communication," Luntz said, "at the very moment when Democrats vaulted ahead 15 years."
Luntz said the Obama campaign often mirrored Dr. Westen's approach. Though Dr. Westen has not worked for the campaign in an official capacity, he has offered guidance, both directly and in his Huffington Post columns.
Instead of using euphemisms like "pro-choice" and "reproductive health," his handbook suggests, liberal candidates might insist that it is un-American for the government to tell men and women when to start a family or what religious beliefs to follow, arguments that test well in focus groups with conservatives and independents. On illegal immigration, he recommends, candidates who have said their plan would "allow" immigrants to become citizens should instead say they will "require" it.
"The idea," Dr. Westen said, "is to start to rebrand progressives using language that's as evocative as the language of the other side, and stop using phrases that just turn people off."
The handbook does not offer a script so much as a menu of options, each of which was poll-tested against conservative arguments. On economics, for example, one message begins with "I want to see the words 'Made in America' again." Another reads, "We need leaders who don't just talk about family values but actually value families."
Celinda Lake, a prominent Democratic strategist in Washington, said of the handbook: "I think people have been overjoyed to have it. I don't think we have rooted our message in the kind of systematic understanding of values and networks of values that Drew uses."
Dr. Westen is not the first to try to whip Democratic messaging into shape. But several political consultants said his scientific approach based largely on recent advances in the study of how the brain reacts to political speech and his advocacy of plain talk made him more effective.
Bill Jones, a moderate Democrat in a conservative, wealthy section of suburban Atlanta, said talking to Dr. Westen had helped him make the decision to run for Congress against the Republican incumbent, Representative Tom Price.
Among other recommendations, Dr. Westen encouraged Jones to make his background as an Air Force veteran a prominent part of his biography. "It wasn't a contrived approach like 'how can we create a persona?' " Jones recalled. "It's 'be the person you are.' "
In a candidates' forum at a church on a recent Saturday afternoon, Bobbie Smith, 77, listened while her husband, a veteran, exchanged war stories with Jones. Smith, who identified herself as a conservative-leaning independent, said she had seen Jones's television commercials, co-produced by Dr. Westen. "I liked the down-to-earth talk," she said. "Common words for common people."
Not everyone has jumped wholeheartedly onto the Westen bandwagon. Though praising Dr. Westen's work, Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, the research wing of the Democratic Leadership Council, said he worried that it focused too much on the message rather than substance.
But Paul Begala, a commentator and Democratic strategist who was an adviser to President Bill Clinton, said that with candidates like Jones, Dr. Westen was helping to shape the future of the party.
"The fact that they're doing this in Georgia is really, really, really important," Begala said. "Great politicians often come out of enemy territory. Ronald Reagan came from Hollywood, and it made him tougher and smarter."
ATLANTA: Democrats up and down the ballot have been trying to reverse the Republican rhetorical dominance that made "liberal" an unsavory label, and many have found help in a slender document percolating through their party's hierarchy.
It is called the "Message Handbook for Progressives From Left to Center," and, along with a companion piece on health care, it was created by Drew Westen, a psychology professor at Emory University here who was virtually unknown in political circles before this election cycle. Several Democratic consultants say it is the first systematic, data-driven effort to mold the language of the left to fit the sensibilities of the center.
Dr. Westen's advice can be heard when Alisha Thomas Morgan, running for re-election to the Georgia House in a conservative suburb of Atlanta, uses the word "leadership" in place of "government" and speaks about the middle class instead of the poor.
Or when Andrew Gillum, a city commissioner in Tallahassee, Florida, who is fighting a ballot initiative against same-sex marriage, tells members of his predominantly black church of the human desire for dignity and respect instead of lecturing them on the evils of discrimination.
Democrats of higher office who have heard Dr. Westen have also shifted their rhetoric, as when Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, fending off a Republican challenger, not only says that "health care is a right for every citizen" but pointedly adds, "Particularly citizens who are working hard every day."
Dr. Westen advises jettisoning wonkish 12-point plans in favor of direct emotional appeals that can compete with those evoked by Republicans using terms like "family values" and "the war on terror."
"We are a centrist nation," he said in an interview, "but people prefer center-left to center-right, even in conservative parts of the country, if they hear equally strong messages on both sides."
Liberal candidates, especially those running in not-so-liberal territory, have latched on to his approach.
"There's almost a rebirth, or a pride, that we can really talk about what we believe and not do so shamefully," Gillum said, adding that Dr. Westen's advice had given him the confidence to speak his mind even on conservative talk radio. "If we communicate it through our stories and our real-life examples, if they don't agree with you then they can at least understand where you come from."
Dr. Westen's ideas began to catch on when he was writing "The Political Brain," a scientific explanation of the central role of emotion in politics, published in 2007, that urged Democrats to stop cowering and fight back.
Among those with whom he has had audiences are Howard Dean, the Democratic national chairman, and Young Elected Officials, a national group of left-leaning city council members and state legislators. During the primaries, Senator Joseph Biden Jr., now Senator Barack Obama's running mate, recommended "The Political Brain" to his campaign staff. Bill Clinton is a fan.
Even Frank Luntz, the architect of many Republican rhetorical successes, says Dr. Westen is fostering a sea change.
"It's as though the Republicans have fallen back 15 years in their communication," Luntz said, "at the very moment when Democrats vaulted ahead 15 years."
Luntz said the Obama campaign often mirrored Dr. Westen's approach. Though Dr. Westen has not worked for the campaign in an official capacity, he has offered guidance, both directly and in his Huffington Post columns.
Instead of using euphemisms like "pro-choice" and "reproductive health," his handbook suggests, liberal candidates might insist that it is un-American for the government to tell men and women when to start a family or what religious beliefs to follow, arguments that test well in focus groups with conservatives and independents. On illegal immigration, he recommends, candidates who have said their plan would "allow" immigrants to become citizens should instead say they will "require" it.
"The idea," Dr. Westen said, "is to start to rebrand progressives using language that's as evocative as the language of the other side, and stop using phrases that just turn people off."
The handbook does not offer a script so much as a menu of options, each of which was poll-tested against conservative arguments. On economics, for example, one message begins with "I want to see the words 'Made in America' again." Another reads, "We need leaders who don't just talk about family values but actually value families."
Celinda Lake, a prominent Democratic strategist in Washington, said of the handbook: "I think people have been overjoyed to have it. I don't think we have rooted our message in the kind of systematic understanding of values and networks of values that Drew uses."
Dr. Westen is not the first to try to whip Democratic messaging into shape. But several political consultants said his scientific approach based largely on recent advances in the study of how the brain reacts to political speech and his advocacy of plain talk made him more effective.
Bill Jones, a moderate Democrat in a conservative, wealthy section of suburban Atlanta, said talking to Dr. Westen had helped him make the decision to run for Congress against the Republican incumbent, Representative Tom Price.
Among other recommendations, Dr. Westen encouraged Jones to make his background as an Air Force veteran a prominent part of his biography. "It wasn't a contrived approach like 'how can we create a persona?' " Jones recalled. "It's 'be the person you are.' "
In a candidates' forum at a church on a recent Saturday afternoon, Bobbie Smith, 77, listened while her husband, a veteran, exchanged war stories with Jones. Smith, who identified herself as a conservative-leaning independent, said she had seen Jones's television commercials, co-produced by Dr. Westen. "I liked the down-to-earth talk," she said. "Common words for common people."
Not everyone has jumped wholeheartedly onto the Westen bandwagon. Though praising Dr. Westen's work, Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, the research wing of the Democratic Leadership Council, said he worried that it focused too much on the message rather than substance.
But Paul Begala, a commentator and Democratic strategist who was an adviser to President Bill Clinton, said that with candidates like Jones, Dr. Westen was helping to shape the future of the party.
"The fact that they're doing this in Georgia is really, really, really important," Begala said. "Great politicians often come out of enemy territory. Ronald Reagan came from Hollywood, and it made him tougher and smarter."
Monday, September 22, 2008,5:16 AM
48 Laws of Obama: An Interview with Strategy Expert Robert Greene
On May 20, 2008, Barack Obama won the state of Oregon. No matter what opinion people made about Obama "not being ready to lead" a bi-racial man with a Muslim father and a Christan mother had taken one more step toward entering the Oval Office. The mauling he gave Senator Clinton in several predominantly White states in massive numbers seemed unthinkable.
Or was it?
In 2000 author Robert Greene penned the 48 Laws of Power. His groundbreaking bestseller gives a modern twist to classical war strategy. Greene's in depth discussion on the effects of mastering of one's emotions can easily be seen in the Clinton vs. Obama skirmishes.
Greene expanded his unique approach to observing warfare in The Art of Seduction and The 33 Strategies of war.
He is arguably the foremost sought after strategist in business, politics and war - our Prince Machiavelli of modern warfare, if you will.
In watching Barack Obama's rise, it is hard to not see a pattern of his victories closely connected with the 48 Laws of Power and the 33 Strategies of War.
At times Obama appears to have been playing a magnificent game of political chess from the start of his bid for the Oval Office. I sat down with Robert Greene to discuss Senator Obama's tactical and strategic movements in his campaign. While everyone seems to have their site locked into the DNC convention, Robert Greene advises that we all prepare ourselves for a protracted political battle.
AB: Lets start with Law 24: The Perfect Courtier. You say that individual "thrives in a world where everything revolves around power and political dexterity. He has mastered the art of indirection; he flatters, yields to superiors, and asserts power over others in the most oblique and graceful manner. Learn and apply the laws of courtiership and there will be no limit to how far you can rise in the court.
"
RG: I never thought about it before, but it does make perfect sense. If you wanted to psychoanalyze it a little bit. With his background, in being bi-racial and having to navigate in different worlds...If you look at his Kenyan father, then you look at the White side in Kansas and Hawaii- he's been towing a line between the two worlds. And if you read his book, he's asking "Where do I fit"? It's a really interesting story, I like his books. He's always had to learn how to be the courtier. He's always had to be diplomatic. How not to offend this person or that. These two sides had very different sensibilities, while he's trying too figure out who he is. So, I think its in his nature. Its not a fake thing. Some people learn to be the courtier later in life. Its a nice quality, but some people can feel like its a little bit manipulative. But I think its very deep in his identity, from his multiracial background. I'm not sure, I can only speculate.
Its very nice. He's very graceful. He does not get angry. I thought the one moment where he blew it a little was in a debate with Clinton. It was in January I believe. He kinda lost his cool. He got a little bit angry and testy. I supported him early on. He was my first pick. For while I felt a little bit alienated from him. I did not think he was tough enough. I wanted to see him fighting back. But I understood later on that that's very hard for him to do. It does not play well. For the position that he is in, trying to be the first Black President. For him to show anger at a White woman was strategically not gonna play. So, he lost it a little bit in this one debate. But he never repeated it. I mean, its not really a strategy on his part, but its very effective.
I was just reading before you called about him speaking in Florida. He was meeting with Jewish voters. It was kind of interesting to see him charming them again, winning them over. I can make references to Jewish people and Jewish culture that are very appropriate. So there he is being the courtier.Its a quality hat will serve very well in his campaign. Bill Clinton was a master at it. He could talk to Hollywood liberals and then he could go to a factory in Ohio.
Now, some people don't think he has the common touch. I think there is a bit of truth to that. Maybe he is not comfortable with the White steel worker in Pennsylvania. But he has a different kind of power. A different kind of charm. I think he'll actually get over some of these supposed weaknesses that he has with White voters. I think he is very much a courter.
AB: The first law I think I openly recognized with Barack is Law 32: Play to Peoples Fantasies. There you say "The truth is often avoided because it is ugly and unpleasant. Never appeal to truth and reality unless you are prepared for the anger that comes for disenchantment. Life is so harsh and distressing that people who can manufacture romance or conjure up fantasy are like oases in the desert: Everyone flocks to them. There is great power in tapping into the fantasies of the masses.
"
Now, I do not mean to imply that he is fraudulent in spirit, or an actor. But, I don't think I have seen someone in my lifetime who has been able to mentally and emotionally move masses the way he does. I can only compare it to watching old footage of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Maybe Malcolm X.
RG: Or JFK.
AB: Perfect example in JFK. It looks like his change theme has drawn millions of people into what they want to see in America. It seems like he creates this dream for you of what America can be, but leaves room for you to impose your dream on top.
RG: I think you're right. We don't like to bring sophisticated psychology when discussing these things. The fantasy always kind of plays a line between a vague hope with a little bit of reality thrown in. If you put too much reality in it obscures. If you put too much hope there is nothing we can really connect to. So, throughout the ages the people who have been able to master this know how to make the perfect illusionary quality. Its like watching a good writer writing a novel.
Barack makes change inspiring. But he does not fill in too many details. Strategically that's very smart. The problem with America in the 21st century is that the country is so splintered. It's cracking up into smaller and smaller niche markets and groups. By region, by ethnicity and all these things. So that makes it hard to connect the whole country together. Its hard to get over all that and bring people together with a message. The only way you can do that is to be very inspiring and not being too concrete with what you are offering.
I can refer to John Kennedy in 1960 when he ran for President. He kinda drove the Republicans crazy with his vagueness. He never really said what he was going to do on a whole score of issues. But he talked about the new frontier and bringing back a certain spirit in America. It really connected in that moment. I think the people around him, like David Axelrod who have backgrounds in marketing an advertising are crafting a story. They are trying to do more of a JFK, or even Regan type campaign. They know that this is the moment for that. Because Americans are very disillusioned with probably the worst President we've ever had. Things look very bleak.
AB: The fantasy law connects directly to Law 45: Preach the Need for change, but never reform too much at once. I think he's hitting law 45 right on the nail.
RG: How so?
AB: Because he keeps the discussion of change very nebulous. Mainly though Obama keeps you believing that A) that change can happen, and B) that he is the agent for the change you want to see in America. One of his best qualities, and something I think Senator Clinton should have embraced was Law 46: Never Appear Too Perfect. He never lets you forget that he's got a wife and kids and that he has his own struggles with cigarettes or whatever. I think 46 keeps people listening to him.
RG: You and I may feel that way. But I'm wondering if other people don't see that in him. I saw him yesterday in his speech after he won Oregon and he said "I'm not perfect, I've made mistakes". I think that kind of humility is very endearing. But I think there are a lot of people that he doesn't connect to. They see him as kind of arrogant and over educated person who is looking down on them. Its funny how its subjective. So to you and I we think he does embody law 46. Other people think that he doesn't do it enough.
It's all fake though really in the end. Because Hillary is eating hot dogs and drinking beer acting like shes one of the yokels. They made one hundred million dollars last year. She comes from a wealthy background. Certainly more elite than he is. Its all fake in the end. But I think that part is subjective in the end. He's going to have to work a bit on his image. He's gonna have to connect with that NASCAR crowd a little bit.
AB: Moving beyond Hillary and looking toward McCain, are we moving from power to the war? If you could tell him to study only 3 of the 33 Strategies of War what would they be?
RG: The one he should study, and has actually done pretty well so far is Strategy 20: Maneuver Them Into Weakness. Its a Chinese concept. I struggled my hardest to bring this to the Western audience, because its not easy to explain. In the East, its the position you take that matters. Everything is related to something else- nothing is isolated. What you want in war or strategy is to take positions that put your rival in a corner and have less options than you.
The Western approach is not like that at all. The Western approach is to go straight in at the enemy and kill as many as you can.
In politics you want to get to a position that allows you to go here or there. Obama did that brilliantly from day one and Hillary messed it up. Here he is moving toward the general election. How can he move John McCain into positions that are untenable? That's the game. You can already see the position he's trying to put McCain in is, "He's Bush" But how do you make that case? Its one thing to say. Its another thing to make people feel it. If he can make people in Kentucky and Pennsylvania feel that McCain will make us live through four more years of the hell we've been living through it will be very effective.
But it can't be just with words. You have to do and show- its interesting to watch. Now, very fortunately, the Democrats control Congress. For instance the vote to the GI bill that just occurred. It will force McCains hand to show that he supports Bush. If he doesn't, he'll alienate his right wing base. In the Power book we call that putting your enemy on the horns of a dilemma. You go right, you are screwed. You go left, you are screwed. If he votes for the GI bill, he looks like a Democrat. If he votes against it, he looks like he's Bush again.
Obama has to keep his options fluid. You don't wanna commit to anything that's gonna screw you in the end. Any kind of position for instance on the economy. He did that in one debate but I don't think that's going to come back to hurt him. Don't say exactly that you'll never raise taxes on this. Keep it a little bit vague. Give yourself room to put McCain in very uncomfortable positions.
Another law from the war book is Strategy 28: Give Your Rivals Enough Rope to Hang Themselves. You never stop a man who's killing himself. McCain has a temper. Its the old Bob Dole thing. Love him or hate him, he's got a temper and its legendary. So he's got to frustrate him and bait him into things. Seeing John McCain lose his temper. It does not look so good. He looks like a cranky old man.
I talk about this in my book in regards to Lee Atwater. He's kind of a satanic figure in politics. He did that very same thing in 1988 with Bob Dole. But I'm afraid its a very powerful tactic and could be very effective on John McCain. I already saw, with the GI bill he got very testy.
War Strategy number 12: Grand Strategy. Its the most important in the book. Its that you plan, and that you do it looking far ahead into the future. You don't want to be someone that's attacking into the wind everything something new comes into the election cycle. Politicians muck this up again and again. Because its not an election that takes place every week. Its in November. One day. There are going to be setbacks. There are going to be things that you did not plan for happening. I mean, Democrats are really bad at this. I mean pathetic bad. If you have a grand strategy, it makes you consistent. It keeps you going in that line, when it seems everything around you not.
So much of the bad stuff happening, with Clinton losing this state or that state- it could have pushed him off course. But it didn't. He stayed pretty consistent on message there. If he follows those, it'll be a slam dunk.
Or was it?
In 2000 author Robert Greene penned the 48 Laws of Power. His groundbreaking bestseller gives a modern twist to classical war strategy. Greene's in depth discussion on the effects of mastering of one's emotions can easily be seen in the Clinton vs. Obama skirmishes.
Greene expanded his unique approach to observing warfare in The Art of Seduction and The 33 Strategies of war.
He is arguably the foremost sought after strategist in business, politics and war - our Prince Machiavelli of modern warfare, if you will.
In watching Barack Obama's rise, it is hard to not see a pattern of his victories closely connected with the 48 Laws of Power and the 33 Strategies of War.
At times Obama appears to have been playing a magnificent game of political chess from the start of his bid for the Oval Office. I sat down with Robert Greene to discuss Senator Obama's tactical and strategic movements in his campaign. While everyone seems to have their site locked into the DNC convention, Robert Greene advises that we all prepare ourselves for a protracted political battle.
AB: Lets start with Law 24: The Perfect Courtier. You say that individual "thrives in a world where everything revolves around power and political dexterity. He has mastered the art of indirection; he flatters, yields to superiors, and asserts power over others in the most oblique and graceful manner. Learn and apply the laws of courtiership and there will be no limit to how far you can rise in the court.
"
RG: I never thought about it before, but it does make perfect sense. If you wanted to psychoanalyze it a little bit. With his background, in being bi-racial and having to navigate in different worlds...If you look at his Kenyan father, then you look at the White side in Kansas and Hawaii- he's been towing a line between the two worlds. And if you read his book, he's asking "Where do I fit"? It's a really interesting story, I like his books. He's always had to learn how to be the courtier. He's always had to be diplomatic. How not to offend this person or that. These two sides had very different sensibilities, while he's trying too figure out who he is. So, I think its in his nature. Its not a fake thing. Some people learn to be the courtier later in life. Its a nice quality, but some people can feel like its a little bit manipulative. But I think its very deep in his identity, from his multiracial background. I'm not sure, I can only speculate.
Its very nice. He's very graceful. He does not get angry. I thought the one moment where he blew it a little was in a debate with Clinton. It was in January I believe. He kinda lost his cool. He got a little bit angry and testy. I supported him early on. He was my first pick. For while I felt a little bit alienated from him. I did not think he was tough enough. I wanted to see him fighting back. But I understood later on that that's very hard for him to do. It does not play well. For the position that he is in, trying to be the first Black President. For him to show anger at a White woman was strategically not gonna play. So, he lost it a little bit in this one debate. But he never repeated it. I mean, its not really a strategy on his part, but its very effective.
I was just reading before you called about him speaking in Florida. He was meeting with Jewish voters. It was kind of interesting to see him charming them again, winning them over. I can make references to Jewish people and Jewish culture that are very appropriate. So there he is being the courtier.Its a quality hat will serve very well in his campaign. Bill Clinton was a master at it. He could talk to Hollywood liberals and then he could go to a factory in Ohio.
Now, some people don't think he has the common touch. I think there is a bit of truth to that. Maybe he is not comfortable with the White steel worker in Pennsylvania. But he has a different kind of power. A different kind of charm. I think he'll actually get over some of these supposed weaknesses that he has with White voters. I think he is very much a courter.
AB: The first law I think I openly recognized with Barack is Law 32: Play to Peoples Fantasies. There you say "The truth is often avoided because it is ugly and unpleasant. Never appeal to truth and reality unless you are prepared for the anger that comes for disenchantment. Life is so harsh and distressing that people who can manufacture romance or conjure up fantasy are like oases in the desert: Everyone flocks to them. There is great power in tapping into the fantasies of the masses.
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Now, I do not mean to imply that he is fraudulent in spirit, or an actor. But, I don't think I have seen someone in my lifetime who has been able to mentally and emotionally move masses the way he does. I can only compare it to watching old footage of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Maybe Malcolm X.
RG: Or JFK.
AB: Perfect example in JFK. It looks like his change theme has drawn millions of people into what they want to see in America. It seems like he creates this dream for you of what America can be, but leaves room for you to impose your dream on top.
RG: I think you're right. We don't like to bring sophisticated psychology when discussing these things. The fantasy always kind of plays a line between a vague hope with a little bit of reality thrown in. If you put too much reality in it obscures. If you put too much hope there is nothing we can really connect to. So, throughout the ages the people who have been able to master this know how to make the perfect illusionary quality. Its like watching a good writer writing a novel.
Barack makes change inspiring. But he does not fill in too many details. Strategically that's very smart. The problem with America in the 21st century is that the country is so splintered. It's cracking up into smaller and smaller niche markets and groups. By region, by ethnicity and all these things. So that makes it hard to connect the whole country together. Its hard to get over all that and bring people together with a message. The only way you can do that is to be very inspiring and not being too concrete with what you are offering.
I can refer to John Kennedy in 1960 when he ran for President. He kinda drove the Republicans crazy with his vagueness. He never really said what he was going to do on a whole score of issues. But he talked about the new frontier and bringing back a certain spirit in America. It really connected in that moment. I think the people around him, like David Axelrod who have backgrounds in marketing an advertising are crafting a story. They are trying to do more of a JFK, or even Regan type campaign. They know that this is the moment for that. Because Americans are very disillusioned with probably the worst President we've ever had. Things look very bleak.
AB: The fantasy law connects directly to Law 45: Preach the Need for change, but never reform too much at once. I think he's hitting law 45 right on the nail.
RG: How so?
AB: Because he keeps the discussion of change very nebulous. Mainly though Obama keeps you believing that A) that change can happen, and B) that he is the agent for the change you want to see in America. One of his best qualities, and something I think Senator Clinton should have embraced was Law 46: Never Appear Too Perfect. He never lets you forget that he's got a wife and kids and that he has his own struggles with cigarettes or whatever. I think 46 keeps people listening to him.
RG: You and I may feel that way. But I'm wondering if other people don't see that in him. I saw him yesterday in his speech after he won Oregon and he said "I'm not perfect, I've made mistakes". I think that kind of humility is very endearing. But I think there are a lot of people that he doesn't connect to. They see him as kind of arrogant and over educated person who is looking down on them. Its funny how its subjective. So to you and I we think he does embody law 46. Other people think that he doesn't do it enough.
It's all fake though really in the end. Because Hillary is eating hot dogs and drinking beer acting like shes one of the yokels. They made one hundred million dollars last year. She comes from a wealthy background. Certainly more elite than he is. Its all fake in the end. But I think that part is subjective in the end. He's going to have to work a bit on his image. He's gonna have to connect with that NASCAR crowd a little bit.
AB: Moving beyond Hillary and looking toward McCain, are we moving from power to the war? If you could tell him to study only 3 of the 33 Strategies of War what would they be?
RG: The one he should study, and has actually done pretty well so far is Strategy 20: Maneuver Them Into Weakness. Its a Chinese concept. I struggled my hardest to bring this to the Western audience, because its not easy to explain. In the East, its the position you take that matters. Everything is related to something else- nothing is isolated. What you want in war or strategy is to take positions that put your rival in a corner and have less options than you.
The Western approach is not like that at all. The Western approach is to go straight in at the enemy and kill as many as you can.
In politics you want to get to a position that allows you to go here or there. Obama did that brilliantly from day one and Hillary messed it up. Here he is moving toward the general election. How can he move John McCain into positions that are untenable? That's the game. You can already see the position he's trying to put McCain in is, "He's Bush" But how do you make that case? Its one thing to say. Its another thing to make people feel it. If he can make people in Kentucky and Pennsylvania feel that McCain will make us live through four more years of the hell we've been living through it will be very effective.
But it can't be just with words. You have to do and show- its interesting to watch. Now, very fortunately, the Democrats control Congress. For instance the vote to the GI bill that just occurred. It will force McCains hand to show that he supports Bush. If he doesn't, he'll alienate his right wing base. In the Power book we call that putting your enemy on the horns of a dilemma. You go right, you are screwed. You go left, you are screwed. If he votes for the GI bill, he looks like a Democrat. If he votes against it, he looks like he's Bush again.
Obama has to keep his options fluid. You don't wanna commit to anything that's gonna screw you in the end. Any kind of position for instance on the economy. He did that in one debate but I don't think that's going to come back to hurt him. Don't say exactly that you'll never raise taxes on this. Keep it a little bit vague. Give yourself room to put McCain in very uncomfortable positions.
Another law from the war book is Strategy 28: Give Your Rivals Enough Rope to Hang Themselves. You never stop a man who's killing himself. McCain has a temper. Its the old Bob Dole thing. Love him or hate him, he's got a temper and its legendary. So he's got to frustrate him and bait him into things. Seeing John McCain lose his temper. It does not look so good. He looks like a cranky old man.
I talk about this in my book in regards to Lee Atwater. He's kind of a satanic figure in politics. He did that very same thing in 1988 with Bob Dole. But I'm afraid its a very powerful tactic and could be very effective on John McCain. I already saw, with the GI bill he got very testy.
War Strategy number 12: Grand Strategy. Its the most important in the book. Its that you plan, and that you do it looking far ahead into the future. You don't want to be someone that's attacking into the wind everything something new comes into the election cycle. Politicians muck this up again and again. Because its not an election that takes place every week. Its in November. One day. There are going to be setbacks. There are going to be things that you did not plan for happening. I mean, Democrats are really bad at this. I mean pathetic bad. If you have a grand strategy, it makes you consistent. It keeps you going in that line, when it seems everything around you not.
So much of the bad stuff happening, with Clinton losing this state or that state- it could have pushed him off course. But it didn't. He stayed pretty consistent on message there. If he follows those, it'll be a slam dunk.
Labels: Music, Politics and African Americans, Strategy